Answers

Can you please contact me at DevPerf@Microsoft.com with some more information on your issues? We'd like to understand what's going on. (Note that IntelliTrace typically represents less than a 10% performance
hit, and that mostly while debugging.)

All replies

Can you please contact me at DevPerf@Microsoft.com with some more information on your issues? We'd like to understand what's going on. (Note that IntelliTrace typically represents less than a 10% performance
hit, and that mostly while debugging.)

Agree, the UI of VS 2010 UI is slow.. Every time I open VS2010, it usually cannot load the complete UI - some of the UI is masked by the wallpaper... My environment is winodws 7 enterprise running on a PC with windows experience score:

CPU : 7.3

Graphics : 4.6

Memory: 5.9

I heard VS 2010 UI is implemented by WPF. Is it the cause of slowness?

We're sorry you're having performance issues on VS 2010. Could you please e-mail the address David Berg posted above? That will get your complaints routed to a group of developers with expertise in diagnosing and fixing performance issues.
It's the best way to have your problems heard, investigated, and potentially fixed. Thanks!

I normally work with several instances of visual studio too. Visual studio 2010 is just dirty slow and kinda unusable for me on the 3 machines I have it installed on. They are beefy machines too. Quad core with 4 gigs of ram, etc. I can
type faster than it can keep up with me, very often it just locks up for a couple seconds, the startup time takes several minutes.

I've been trying out VC++ 2010 Express, and find the text editing frustratingly slow. It regularly pauses for no reason, and often lags several characters behind what I'm typing. However, sometimes it works fine.

I think it does it less with less files open, and I think switching off the intellisense update option has helped too.

Earlier I tried editing a simple text file, which was fast until I copied some C++ code into it - weird because it shouldn't be treating it as code I'd have thought. Then I closed the solution I had open, and tried again, made no difference, but then opened
the solution and now the text editing was fast again.

I don't have any problem with slow loading of the app, or the solution, or any general GUI slowness. It's that the GUI regularly locks up momentarily, for maybe half a second at a time. Not terrible for most purposes but annoying whilst typing.

@AbdElRaheim - How consistently can you reproduce the performance issues? Are you willing to provide more details on your solution? Wouild you be willing to take a profile and send it to us so we can take a look? If so, please contact me
at DevPerf@Microsoft.com.

@DEmberton - How consistently can you reproduce the performance issues? Would you be willing to take a profile and send it to us so we can take a look? If so, please contact me at
DevPerf@Microsoft.com.

I'm wondering how could a major release like VS2010 Ultimate is not thoroughly performance tested and released to the market to damage the Microsoft brand name which is already in jeopardy. I too have the same opening slowness issue (take 2 mins to open)
and editing issues.

How can I capture the profile to send it to that address? Can you provide some detail?

VS2010 Ultimate was very thouroughly performance tested. We invested very heavilly in performance testing - particularly in the beta and release candidate time frames, and you can read about some of those efforts on Brian Harry's and Jason Zander's
blogs. Of course, there's still room for improvement.

What's interesting is that many VS2010 users rate performance as Excellent, with over an overwhelming majority rating it as Okay or better. However, there is a small number of people who are finding performance to be unacceptable. So we're trying
to understand what those customers are seeing that we didn't see in our testing, and what we can do to fix it.

I appreciate your willingness to help. Please contact me at
DevPerf@Microsoft.com with more information about the issues you're seeing and we can work with you on getting a profile.

On my system (Windows 7 64bit Professional, Intel Core2 Quad Q9550) the Visual Studio 2008 Professional took may be 4-5 seconds to load; but the Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate's startup time is slightly more (it is noticeable). If I want to open several projects
or single files in several windows, sometimes it can be annoying.

The same thing is true about VC++ compile time. In VS 2008 Pro, VC++'s compile time was MUCH MUCH faster.

I just wanted to share this so that may be this can be changed or addressed in future versions if other users have noticed this. VS2008 Pro was noticeably faster in these two areas. I hope this can be changed.

Merged byBrittany BehrensFriday, September 24, 2010 9:41 PMPerf and how to work with MSFT on perf issues is being discussed in this other thread.

i'm using vs 2010 pro on w7 x64. the machine is a quadcore amd /w 8 gb of ram. the only extension i have installed (afaik) is the current version of resharper.

the solution i'm working on has 90+ projects and several thounsand files. none of the following problems appeard (same machine and solution) when i was still using vs 2008:

- after working for some hours, the editor gets so slow, it can no longer be used. (i'm talking about a 3-4 seconds delay for every single keystroke.). i have to stop and restart vs 2010 at least twice a day to keep on working.

- when the editor is still responsive, typing in code will slow down media playback. (that is, apart from vs 2010, i'm also using windows media player. that is the only other program i have running. i'm simply listening to music.). when i stop typing, music
playback is as expected, soon as i start typing, the music gets slower. i have never had a setup where working in any ide ever had any influence on media playback ever since windows 3.1.

apart from the, the overall performance of all editors (code, forms, images) is kinda bad and feels sluggish all the time.

Very sluggish interface, pauses during coding for no apparent reason ...... then catches up, try loading and scrolling through a xaml file ...... your joking.

The experience can only be likened to working over a citrix connection with a 56k modem.

I'm very dissapointed, especially as the department bought 6 new i7 core machines with 8GB of ram to speed up development, may as well go back to the old machines with VS2008 which ironically are MUCH faster.

Has anyone got any tips to speed things up (but I'd rather not turn off features that we are are paying thousands of bucks for!!!)

We have the same problems with Visual Studio 2010 Premium on all computers here, including the one with 8 CPU cores, 32GB of RAM, very fast RAID'ed 15000rpm hard drives running Windows Vista Pro x64, no add-ins of any kind. Solution
contains about 20 projects, all native C++. We use templates, STL, boost.

2. Text editor slows down to a crawl after hours of use. Have to reboot studio -- not as much of a problem as #1.

New C+0x language features is the reason why we upgraded, but we're definitely having some regrets. #1 must be fixed soon! Especially in light of the fact that the Code Definition Window actually finds things almost instantly, while "Go To Definition"
keeps on going. Interesting that pressing ESC while "Go To Declaration" is searching, cancels the hourglass cursor, but not the actual search operation. I don't know how to quit that. Studio is locked up and nothing can be done
until it completes.

Note also that I use VS2010 also as a TFS client for old Visual Basic 6 because we migrate old Visual Source Safe databases: this was a very unsuccefull operation: too long time to manage projects
outside Visual Basic 6.

I'm very dissapointed, especially as the department bought 6 new i7 core machines with 8GB of ram to speed up development, may as well go back to the old machines with VS2008 which ironically are MUCH faster.
Has anyone got any tips to speed things up (but I'd rather not turn off features that we are are paying thousands of bucks for!!!)

Consider hardware tuning:

Core i7 is faster when you use all three memory channels. Install 3 DIMMs e.g. 3x2GB or 3x4GB.

We have just upgraded to VS2010 from VS2008 and are now seriously considering reverting to VS2008 or switching to Linux.

Every one of our developers finds VS2010 10.0.30319.1 RTMRel (Ultimate edition) to be worse than VS2008.

Performance ranges from poor to awful. Opening a solution is a lot slower than VS2008 but I can like with that as I tend to work on a group of solutions over the course of a day. It's performance of intellisense and building that is the killer.

I wanted to challenge your claim that the majority of users are happy with VS2010.
Maybe the majority of people who contact Microsoft are happy, but other independent blogs indicate a slight majority of unhappy users.

Quite apart from the performance problems, intellisense is overall a step backwards from VS2008.
VS2008 sometimes was unable to tell the difference between a function definition and declaration.
It would goto the declaration when you asked for the definition and vice versa.
VS2010 is even worse in that regard.
To be fair, it is somewhat better at working out the members of templated classes.

1. Intellisense is often so slow as to be useless.
It can easily take 30 seconds to goto a definition.
Trying to get function signatures or member lists is usually as sluggish.
We now do a "Find In Files" for the function/class and get the signature/member-list that way.

2. Overall IDE performance gradually declines over time.
If I clean up all intermediate files & folders and then reboot the machine, it improves temporarily.
The decline is in these areas - goto-definition, search, compiling and linking.

3. VS2010 sometimes affects the whole machine during a build, particularly when I have more than 1 session of the IDE open.
The entire machine freezes up - I cannot switch to any other task, keystrokes are ignored.
It returns to normal when the build is complete. Killing vcpkgsrv.exe does not help.

If I have 2 instances building at once, the machine always freezes.
By contrast, VS2008 could easily handle multiple builds at one time.

4. There does not always seem to be much going on when my machine freezes.
PerfMon says CPU ranges from 1 to 5% with occasional peaks to 13% for the devenv.exe which is doing the build.
The other devenv.exe processes are not using any CPU. Commit & Physical memory usage both show 1GB free.

5. When I run VS2008 on the same machine and on the same projects, the performance is exactly as it was before we installed VS2010.

6. I have disabled intellisense, but that did not make any significant difference.

jasho_me thinks there may be contention on some global system locks.
"The situation resembles the problem with the shared clipboard mutex in TextServices for Windows XP, which caused the VS debugger to hang the whole machine."
He also comments on constant disk activity "which implies many disk operations on small chunks of data."

I have this issue too, at first I thought it might be one of my addons, but after disabling them all it still did it. I do not suffer from the load time issue, but my IDE randomly freezes for seconds at a time while typing, clicking and scrolling etc.

I managed to make this less prominent by going to Tools -> Options -> Text Editor -> C/C++ -> Advanced and then setting Auto Quick Info to False and Disable IntelliSense to True. There may be other similar options for other languages.

Even with these settings changed the time taken to switch between tabs is still far too high, but at least the random freezing seems to be less common.

Changing these settings has no adverse affect on my coding experience as I use VisualAssistX as a replacement to IntelliSense which did an infinitely better job in VS2008 at auto complete than VS2008 itself did.

I'm very dissapointed, especially as the department bought 6 new i7 core machines with 8GB of ram to speed up development, may as well go back to the old machines with VS2008 which ironically are MUCH faster.
Has anyone got any tips to speed things up (but I'd rather not turn off features that we are are paying thousands of bucks for!!!)

Consider hardware tuning:

Core i7 is faster when you use all three memory channels. Install 3 DIMMs e.g. 3x2GB or 3x4GB.

Core i7 is faster when you use all three memory channels. Install 3 DIMMs e.g. 3x2GB or 3x4GB.

Use a SSD for %SYSTEMROOT% and the %PROGRAMFILES% folders.

Don't you think that this is a software issue (VS itself indeed) rather than a hardware issue?

I heard that several people complaining are actually using high-end PC configuration. Based on my simple logic, if one has already used a high-end PC and still encounter this kind of software slowdown, I don't think it's a hardware issue anymore: it's
the software that matters.

I myself only use a Core 2 Duo notebook. Comparing my PC configuration to those high-end ones, there's a possibility that I won't be able to use VS anymore :D.

I'm sorry to hear about the performance issues you're running into. I agree that there are a number of people complaining about performance, my statement about the majority being happy is a reference to a survey we did showing over 90% of our customer
base was happy. However, that's not enough, we need to do better. (We're also doing another, broader, survey to see how that's trending as was noted by Maximillian.)

Since you're running XP, please make sure you have the
Windows Automation 3 API installed. Not having it installed can result in significant delays in working with long UI lists (such as intellisense popups).

Also, we've seen a number of these types of hangs and crashes are actually due to Video Device/Driver problems. Try
turning off hardware acceleration and see if it helps.

Together, those issues make up about 15% of the performance problems we're seeing, so they're not a panacea, but they're a good place to start (and they are unique to VS2010, VS2008 didn't use hardware rendering so it wasn't an issue). You should probably
also try disabling add-ins to understand their impact.

I'm sorry to hear about the performance issues you're running into. See my response to John above. If you're running Vista or XP check out the
Windows Automation 3 API installed, and regardless of OS try
turning off hardware acceleration and see if it helps (even some newer systems are being shipped with video drivers that don't support D2D very well). You may want to check out the effect of turning off your AV, we've seen some of them have a major
impact on performance (but it's more of a file IO issue, not a video/editing issue, so it doesn't seem to match your issues).

While we've seen some people with high end systems and major performance problems, that doesn't mean that low end systems don't work. Instead what we're usually finding is that there's some specific configuration, driver, add-in, etc. that's causing
performance problems. Of course, more memory never hurts.

While we've seen some people with high end systems and major performance problems, that doesn't mean that low end systems don't work. Instead what we're usually finding is that there's some specific configuration, driver, add-in, etc. that's causing
performance problems. Of course, more memory never hurts.

Ah, I'm sorry David. I didn't mean to say that VS wouldn't work on low-end system. I just say that there's a possibility that would be case. Considering a high-end PC is the upper limit, is it really necessary to push it beyond the limit? In that case, I'd
rather to look elsewhere rather than to push it beyond.

The fact is that in my Core 2 Duo (with 4 GB memory) notebook, I do notice slow performance in using VS2010. Thanks for the memory upgrade suggestion, it's just my notebook has limitation of 4 GB maximum, and I have occupied all of them.

I would just like to say that I agree with many of the other posters here, and find it somewhat frustrating just how slow VS2010 Ultimate loads and switches between file views. I am currently working on a tiny WPF test project, with only one project file,
and it takes far longer just to open and load the solution than 2008 did. I also find that sometimes it will just completely hang on opening, and basically 'freeze up' for awhile - and again, this is with a tiny solution that only has one project file, 2
class files, and 1 XAML file.

I love the appearance and fuctionality of the IDE, but because of slow performance, and probably going to go back to using 2008, which I thought was pretty fast, until these performance issues are resolved. I was thinking maybe it was just Ultimate, but
from what other posters have said, it isn't.

Project is MFC C++ spread over about 20 projects/folders and using Boost 1.44. After working on the project for 3 hours devenv.exe is reported to be VirtSize:820M and Private:280M.

Been using it for around 4 months and although it 'feels' much slower than VS 2008 it's generally quite usable apart from Go to Definition or Go to Declaration which takes forever, ie regularily more than 30 secs. It's quicker to launch external
find tool Agent Ransack, do a search through source, and manually open file.

It speeds up on repeated requests (e.g. requesting the same Go to definition a second time is normally pretty fast) but I don't want to play the Russian Roulette "Will it, won't it" game because the bullet is a locked UI. If it can't find the definition
within a couple of seconds I can usually find it myself quicker but with the UI locked I have that teeth grinding wait for it to return.

However, the key reason we'll stick with VS 2010 is that the C++ compiler is much better and produces faster code.

Dave.

ps Could someone please find whoever thought that the new help system was 'good enough', take them out back, and ... well, at least take away their keycard so they can't get back in the building.

In my own case of running VS2010 on a a not too high spec machine, (Core2 Duo 4GB RAM running WinXP Pro SP3 with Windows Automation 3 API installed and graphics acceleration off), I find some slightly different additional issues. I should point out
that my experience is not as great as the rest of you so lack of knowledge of settings may play a part. I am also aware that a move to Windows7 would represent an improvement.

The speed issues are absolutely horrendous at times, I have known 'find all references' to work through taking over a minute to complete 1% of the search for example, and while this occurs control is lost completely. Screens redraw at less than a line
per second. This is never linked with high CPU usage or memory problems. It is constant disc access which is the killer in my own case. At random times the HDD access light comes on constantly and everything grinds to a halt for anything
from 1 minute to 30 minutes. At these times the CPU usage is never above 5% and memory shows over 1.5GB free.

Simple aspects like defrag are taken care of. No security problem can be found. Disc diagnostics show no physical problem with the HDD. Are there others out there experiencing this aspect of the problem too or is it something else in my
own setup which I may have configured incorrectly?

Albert - Yes, we are seeing the same issue with the hard drive activity. There are times (frequently unfortunately) where it seems like Intellisense parsing takes over the entire computer. CPU usage is always <5% and 1/2 of total RAM is free.
However, the disk sits there grinding, VS is frozen, and trying to switch to other open windows using the task bar is very painful. Those Windows take 30+ seconds to come up and redraw incredibly slowly. Mouse movement is also erratic during these
times, often not even moveable for 5+ seconds. Killing VS brings the computer back to normal operation.

We have multiple systems, all with a similar configuration to yours. Defrag is done weekly. Graphics acceleration was one of the first things to go (even after getting the latest video card drivers) - with it, VS repaints were very
sluggish.

It seems like any C++ solution with more than about 30 projects starts to break down. We have multiple that are right around that number and they are so-so performance wise. Unfortunately we have one that is 89 and VS has to be killed and restarted
about 3 times per day just to make it somewhat usable. We were previously using VS2005. We never had any performance issues with it - even for the large solution. Intellisense wasn't always accurate, but at least it was fast (if it was going
to fail to find something it never hung VS for 30+ seconds as 2010 does).

I haven't tried completely disabling Intellisense to check the performance. I am guessing it is the root of most issues (besides the hardware acceleration of course). However, we paid big money for this tool and turning off Intellisense starts
to reduce it to a glorified text editor. MSFT - I cannot believe you haven't seen these issues. Do you use VS for large C++ projects? We really need some help with these issues for SP1.

Good to hear I am not alone with this aspect of the problem(s) Kevin. I am now in the process of upgrading to Win7 because of this. I wouldn't have chosen to move from XP, it does what I need and I am just plain comfortable with it, but established
"upgrade policies" are out of our control and apparently must be adhered to. If VS10 doesn't really work with anything other than Win7 then who am I to suggest that there is something wrong with that.

So I am currently working with a clean laptop which is much the same spec as the PC which is being upgraded. Disappointingly the problems are exactly the same! Guess that rules out anything in the setup of the original machine. The solution
is a simple single project test application to develop a couple of basic classes around our standard company libraries, so not even an overly complex setup for Intellisense to handle.

But the question is now large in my mind, does it actually work with Win7? Judging by the comments I have read I may just be swapping one set of problems for another. This really is rather poor and not at all what we should expect when we copnsider
what we paid for the upgrade.

Oh, and I'd happily send profile details - - - if only someone would respond to the previous posts and tell me what and where! But if we were all aware of how to get this info I suppose the response may be overwhelming. (But then wouldn't it offer
a more accurate representation of the true scale of these problems? Oh, silly me, yes, of course it would!)

I too am experiencing all of the above working on an ASP.NET Web application. This disk I/O is INSANE! I never saw an application hit the disk so often and so long...HD light is on constantly! Also when switching between View Design, View Code and View Markup
the environment locks up the CPU performance is pegged at 70%. I really cannot count how many Crash Dumps I have sent Microsoft. What a huge mistake trusting Microsoft’s technology…so embarrassing!

I’m not going to bother sharing my Hardware specification because no other application (Visual Studio 2005) is behaving this poorly…

The truth is Microsoft released a major piece of $#it and we, the trusting fools are now suffering for it!

I agree with most of the posters here. I have a 20 VC++ projects solution and the whole IDE is slow. Maybe microsoft did an performance improvement for small projects, but it's entirely the opposite with big solutions. We are considering switching back
to VS 2005

I am noticing the trend that as subsequent iterations of a Microsoft application come out, it is more sluggish and a resource hog. Even with the latest Windows Live Messenger...takes longer to fire up. What the heck is it doing?

Here is my experience with VS2010 at work,

1) Edit some code (it can be a single character on a single line)

2.)hit F5

3.)go get some water

4.)walk around and chat with people about how long it takes your computer to complie the project

5.) Return to desk and wait a little more

6.)Application starts...oops...that didn't fix what you wanted it to...shut down

After reading this entire thread, I have to wonder why Microsoft thought it was smarter than Sun. Sun tried to make (in practical terms) a interpreted script-kiddie language (java) good enough to be used for serious desktop development
and 15 years later it is still a sluggish kludge. After watching that spectacular failure, Microsoft decided to follow their lead with C#, .NET and WPF.
Stuff like C#, java and .NET are fine for basic cookie-cutter database apps like we used to do in Visual Basic 6 and server apps that don't need a gui. However, this approach has NEVER worked well for commercial-quality desktop development.

The fact that you can't do native development on Win Phone 7 is a statement that MS just doesn't comprehend that big-boy programmers and programs require big-boy tools. There should be two classes of developer tools...RAD stuff for quick-and-dirty or cookie
cutter apps and low-skill programmers and a toolset for big boys who don't mind having to track their own pointers and release them. There should be a class of developer tools oriented for making hard tasks easier or automate mundane tasks...not oriented toward
making it easier for unskilled labor to write code.
MS has taken a RAD toolset and tried to push to solve a problem (a comprehensive desktop developer tool suite) that requires big-boy tools. The person or people at MS who thought it was a great idea to rewrite VS as a .NET app should have been forced to use
Eclipse or NetBeans for a year so they could come to understand what a bad idea the concept was.
One of the great features of the iPhone that I applaud is that code runs natively on the device and the developer toolkit is based on the C family of languages....not Adobe AIR...not Java...not Javascript. The developer attention that this platform is drawing
should encourage the development a new generation of programmers who know how to work without a garbage collector holding their hands.

Speaking on this subject of Phone development....

Dear Microsoft,
I currently have a large codebase for commercial apps that targets Windows, MacOSX and iOS. If you think I am going to rewrite that codebase in C# to bring my apps to Win Phone 7, you are gravely mistaken. I also direct that same message to HP, RIM and Google
with respect to their mobile platforms.

I am using Windows Vista 32 bit on a dual core intel 3ghz processor, 1 GB of ram, Visual Studio Ultimate. Load time for Visual Studio on first load is about 10 seconds, load time on subsequent loads is 2-4 seconds. Building in two ide's at the same time
in C++ completes in about 7-10 seconds.

Projects consist in a range of sizes, from very small projects 1-2 files, to very large projects (500+ files), all the while Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is lightning fast for me.

Is your app any where near as complex as a modern software IDE? RAD tools are fine for low-end development. But, I was talking about an IDE...particularly one that tries to do things like intellisense on C++.

I've tried Eclipse, JBuilder and NetBeans over the years. They were all sluggish and clunky. I've NEVER used a desktop app written in java that wasn't sluggish. So, what am I supposed to conclude when I go on a MS developer forum and read post after post of
people saying that VS2010 (managed code for the first time ever) is now slow and clunky?

We currently use Visual Studio 2005 with Win32 C++ and Intel Fortran. Our application is massive, millions of lines of code (compiled using makefiles due to its complexity).

We did not upgrade to VS2008, because initial tests suggested that the C++ code generated is notably slower (same optimization settings from makefiles, so this was not one of those upgrades that appeared slower because optimization settings are not transferred).
Also, we have to upgrade Intel compilers for a number of people at the same time, so it is not a trivial upgrade.

We are planning to upgrade to VS2010 next year. One of our developers tried VS 2010 (just debugging, compiled using 2005), and reported that it is painfully slow to debug in general compared with 2005 (takes a few seconds to step over each line), on the
same machines (we use high end machines).

We have also noticed that with each new release VS is a little more sluggish and more likely to sometimes lock up while debugging (which we work around by restarting it after killing it in the task manager, closing all open files, and then restarting it
again). Please reverse that trend!

Also, why do the LIB files have to be moved every release? Please stop moving them around.

It would also be nice if vendors like Intel Fortran do not have to rewrite their Visual Studio integration code each release because Microsoft changes the interface each release. Having to upgrade their compilers at the same time makes it a much larger process.

Then, given on the comments in this forum, perhaps Microsoft should hire you to run the Visual Studio team since you know how to do it.

You'll have to pardon my skepticism. I have a hard time believing that all the extra code and complication that goes into a virtual runtime and a high level language like C# don't have performance costs.

Just want to share my expirience with VS2010 "slow" work. After migration of one of my solutions (40+ projects) to VS2010 I as many others noticed incredibly slow scrolling in the VS`s editor. Every scroll or key press takes about 3-5 seconds on
a AMD 4 core CPU + 8Gb RAM. After googling I didn`t found any way to fix it except some general suggestions like disabling GPU acceleration and disabling all installed plugins. The second suggestion I didn`t take into account as all plugins (Resharper
and so on) works very well on VS2008, my bad. At the end of the day of fight I`ve tried to run VS in the safe mode (devenv.exe /safemode) and... what a mirracle, VS works without any delays... at all (GPU acceleration was enabled). Then I disabled every VS
plugin until I found a VS-killer - 'Spell Checker' plugin which has been disabled and now my VS works blazing fast. It is really faster than VS2008 (couple of SPs and it would be a star). Thanks MS!

Same here. This is one of the reasons, we skipped Visual Studio 2010 and are sticking with Visual Studio 2008 in our company. Microsoft made a big mistake by switching to WPF. We don't need all those fancy graphics and animations. It's just too slow even
on my high end machine. I don't think they will fix this with SP1 either. Vista SP1 didn't fix Vista so am sure the same thing will happen with VS 2010 too

I agree that VS2010 is sluggish, especially when starting. My specs: VS2010 Ultimate RTM, Win 7 Pro x64, 4GB RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 OC'd to 3.20 ghz. It really should be obvious (it is to me) that VS2008 is much faster. While I appreciate
MS trying to understand the problem, them asking for perf. profiles is actually quite rude since many times MS takes the info it gets from customers and uses it to fix the problem in the *next* version. Seriously, we should all push MS to not let VS2010
stop at SP1. SP1 will likely not fix the slowness. The comment you see a lot from MS (especially on the Connect site) is that "we'll look at it for a future version". That irritates me so much. Whatever happened to taking
pride in keeping the software you sell updated???

I've gotten the slow cursor a few times and deleting the .suo put it back in order. I lose the window placements and loaded files. By slow cursor, I mean very slow.

As for starting, while it's run already today, starting it up just now took exactly 3 seconds by Mississippi time. It's not much more than that for a cold start. It's Pro on -7/32, 2.8 MB, 2.33G, a
5.5 perf rating (memory speed is rated much faster in -7/64 at 6.3 instead of 5.5). Disk is 5.9. CPU is 7.2. No real-time malware monitoring; never had anything to want to.

The cursor problem started around the time I tried the Productivity Power Tools thing. It wasn't the cleanest removal. Not going there again.

I have a brand new laptop (Thinkpad t410), running windows 7 and 2gb ram. I thought this might have fixed my speed issues but it's just dreadful.

- Starting up takes minutes - even longer than Firefox ;)

- Shutting down takes about a minute.

However, the thing that really annoys me is in a relatively small c++ solution (maybe three embedded projects and 20 or 30 source/header files), attempting to find a declaration takes that long a popup from Visual Studio appears apologising for the slowness.
This is after it has parsed all of the files, btw. Something must be going wrong because if I attempt to go to the declaration again (of the same class, method, etc previously found), it takes just the same length of time - surely despite all these slow issues
it should index the classes/methods you've already been to?

Yes, it's very slow once you get several forms, several tableadapters, etc. When I open a form for editting it takes several seconds before it responds, hearing beeps. Contacting microsoft or claiming some people said it performes good is stupid, it's
the software. I guess .net applications are also much slower than normal applications. And VS 2010 was build in .net right? It's also very buggy, giving errors in XSD files after for instance turning off auto generated update for a table adapter. When is SP1
comming? Also fix the bug using access 2010 libraries to open ACCDB files with forms that have bindingsources, calling savefiledialog gives crashes (locked memory). I hope I don't need the newest machine for this sofwate and the software I build. I got a cor
2 quad 2.33Ghz with 4 GB of memory. Got about 7 forms, 20 tableadapters, 5 reports and only 1 module and performance is too slow for easy programming.

Add me to the list of unhappy VS2010 users. I'm experiencing the same set of problems everyone else is complaining about in this thread. The keyboard becomes unresponsive, building sometimes will hang the computer during the link step. I have to restart
the program a couple times during my work day when it just randomly starts hanging every 5 seconds. It's horrible.

VS 2010 is also slow on our development machines. (For example my computer is a core i7 950 with 6GB of ram running 64 bit Windows 7). But not that slow as the complaints here. I'd say that almost everything is approximately 25% slower compared to VS2008.
(debugging, compiling, startup, single stepping, etc). Nothing hangs or crashes or runs until infinity, and it's usable, but VS2010 is generally slower than VS2008.

By the way the garbage collection keystroke combination helped. Thanks! This seems like a hack added so that usability testing could stay on schedule without waiting for the next build to be released. Must have forgot to remove
it.

I am in the same boat. I finally talked my corporation into upgrading to VS 2010 (130000 employees worldwide) and I am trying to figure out how to go back. I went from VS 2003 to VS 2010 and I have a very minimal test solution that has only
one project and maybe 15 forms. It will sometimes lockup for 45 minutes or more when changing from one form to another or when saving a form. I have had to kill the IDE several times, but end up losing any unsaved work or even corrupting files.
This has got to be fixed.

Add me to the list of very frustrated developers. I have a quad-core processor and 4GB of memory with Windows 7 Ultimate x64 and Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is almost unusable. I spend
more time waiting for windows and dialogs to open up than I do actually programming. I run HD video editing software, 3D software, Photoshop, high-end games and countless other resource intensive applications and they all soar on my system.
Meanwhile, a basic text/dialog GUI brings my entire machine to a screeching halt.

But my work place computer is very slow. This one has Core 2 Duo 3GHz, 4GB memory, Windows Vista 32-bit). I can see the Visual Studio keep updating something (from the VS status window).

If I run process explorer, I can see the CPU peek constantly, especially when I edit the source code. My workplace is using Novell Network, with McAfee antivirus. All of my co-workers have the same issues.

I tried the Ctrl + Shift + Alt + F12 as suggested by Selious and it seemed like it worked but only momentarily. The moment I clicked the save button, the window froze for a minute. Has anyone found a fix for this problem please post it. Its getting a little
annoying.

It seems there's been some performance improvements done for VS vNext. Some important improvements I notice are much more efficient memory usage in build process, faster build using parallel build, and more responsive VS UI when
doing build.

I can't wait to see other performance improvements, like one related to text editors: C# and XAML!

VS2010 is the Vista of development environments. It looks shiny, and I want it to work, but it never will. It's slow and it crashes more often than not. I'm now resigned that we just have to wait until vNext and pray it turns out more like windows 7. Its
going to be painful waiting though as my company is now committed to migrating to 2010.

I'm developing on an Intel I7 based computer. It is the most powerful machine I have ever used. It can render millions of polygons at 60 Hz, each with complex routines running over every pixel. I should never, ever have to wait whilst I'm typing.
There should be no delay. There was no delay coding in borland pascal 20 years ago on a 386. I don't care what it's doing in the background - it has 8 beefy cores to choose from! There's nothing wrong with a hardware accelerated UI but it's not free - you
have to feed your graphics card right. Maybe the WPF people can talk to the DirectX people more often.

The hard disk light is, on the other hand, flashing all the time in windows 7. The hard disk is slow and whatever fancy caching you might have, you should only access it when you really need to. For another thing, the noise is annoying, it's wearing out
my hardware and I can't get over the feeling that if I don't know exactly why my disk is being accessed then something nefarious is probably going on.

8 gigs is a lot of ram, I don't mind if visual studio uses more of it and stops using my hard disk as a merry go round.

It doesn't matter whether it is in C++ or C#/.NET. Ultimately its a product being shipped and will always be compared with its predecessors which had a very good performance. I strongly believe Microsoft should 'eat its own cooking' for some long period
before dishing it out to the world; we do it in our organizations. Ok agreed that Microsoft needs logs, needs to collect data, etc. regarding how VS works at the customer's ends (mainly because MS engineers are not able to 'reproduce' the issue). But then
why doesn't Microsoft contact the other organizations which are in partner network? I believe they or someof them would be more than glad to share the performance data. No one will share the source code projects with Microsoft to reproduce the issue at Microsoft
premises, obviously not, but MS Engineers can definitely fix apppointments and travel to the partner locations (may not be in the entire world, but how about within US itself?). I believe MS should reach out rather than make others beg on knees.

I'm replying in here because I installed SP1 and it has not given any fraction of IDE performance improvement whatsoever. People have started switching to different IDEs or products for coding rather than use VS 2010 IDE (including SP1).

VS2010 sp1 async ctp + f# ctp started very very slow. I just disabled some extensions like vscommands,vsvim etc.. and it seems to have fixed the ultra slow startup.. I think vscommand is conflicting with resharper.

Anyway I also find that Visual studio 2010 sp2 should include a lot of performance tweak and also you should have an internal extensions monitoring so that we can see if extensions conflict are the cause.

For now i recommend other programmers to first of all buy the fastest 4kb/write/read SSD you can find for the OS + for your source files. Even raid could be better for those who can spawn the cash..

SSD is a must since normal HHD are extremely slow at seeking and with little files like source code files..

of course, I still have the fu... resharper loosing his highlighting color bug on certain projects..... can't believe i'm still having that MOth...fu... bug..

For myself I've had enough. I'm using Eclipse, GCC, CodeBlocks and LLVM/Clang. The only things keeping me on windows are/were games and Visual Studio. Seeing as MS don't seem to care much for either, I'm probably better off with Mac or Linux.

>> after working for some hours, the editor gets so slow, it can no longer be used. (i'm talking about a 3-4 seconds delay for every single keystroke.). i have to stop and restart vs 2010 at least twice a day to keep on working.

this seems to have gone away /w sp1.

>> - when the editor is still responsive, typing in code will slow down media playback.

i replaced my (cheap) video card with another (still cheap, but more modern) card, and this has gone away.

>> apart from the, the overall performance of all editors (code, forms, images) is kinda bad and feels sluggish all the time.

Just wanted to add one more complaint to this master list. I think MSVC 10 will go down in history as the Vista of MSVC releases, as in: How could they let something this obviously bad out the door? Please fix it! I have major brand loyalty
to Microsoft and MSVC, and I have ever since MSVC 1 running on Windows 3.1. If you can't figure it out though, I'll have no choice but to abandon MS products.

Its really painfull to see, that in 2011 MS has still not mastered a powerfull IDE. I guess to keep its OEMs happy it still lacks all the features Eclipse has and VisualAssist offered for years. I switching to gcc and the like. Just tried to compile the
xbmc.org under vs2010 express and type a few hacks. Its so slow! Typing, clicking, the basic things an editor should be able to do at lightning speed. Not so vs2010.

Especially annoying are things are do all the time: click on variable or class and click "Go to definition/declaration" and then it starts working really hard, disk is heavily reading something and whole IDE is not responding. And finding this declaration
takes few seconds almost every time! And my project has... 3 small files with 10 classes, wow!

And when I try to find declaration of something hidden deeply in header files... omg, that takes ages!

Also almost every move I do in VS IDE takes few seconds... simple click on "Tools" sometimes takes 2-4 seconds to open the menu! This is REALLY WRONG.

Really, please fix this or I'm really switching back to some older version.

Btw. I tried using QT Designer lately I to be honest - it has some very nice features that I'm missing now in VS... Like very fast finding of declarations of variables when I click it while holding Ctrl.

I had this problem. But only when certain files were open. I fixed it.

Symptoms:

1) Scroll through the offending file (about 2000 lines long and is debugging output), VS2010 locks, in task manager one of my cores goes to about 90% utilization

2) Open similar size (in lines) source file and no problems.

3) Studied offending file more closely and found a few lines that were 85,000 characters long. Deleted them and the problem went away. Put them back in, the problem returns.

4) Over minutes, the problem seems to be infectious, slowly causing switching to other programs (Alt-Tab) to not respond, other programs seem less responsive (like getting onto this website)

5) I found the offending output generating line and changed it.

VS2010, XP, i7 CPU, 3.24GB RAM

The deep down root cause was a conditional break point that did not break, but would print out an object as a string. The object was complex and output as an XML file. All the System.Environment.NewLine references would put in the string "/r/n"
rather than a return/linefeed pair. This resulted in a very long line. The same ToString function called from Trace.WriteLine would used the return/linefeed pair. So the break point support of this is limited.

I'm adding my name to the list of unhappy customers. Most of my complaints are dependent on how long VS is left open while working on a project. This is especially painful with ASP.Net projects, I can leave the machine for an hour and come back
and the UI is virtually unusable. It takes several seconds for a menu to show up, scroll or type text. I have to close everything and restart Visual Studio.

There seems to be a lot of locking contention going on, I've tried the GC cleanup shortcut and it helps very little. Usually a restart is required. I thought it might actually have been to do with some of my network mapped drives (which I wasn't using) but
removing them didn't help. This is the first time I've started to consider other IDE's as VS2010 has just been a pain for every day developers, especially for the $$$.

At least with SP1 they fixed the find window from moving a pixel to the right every time it opened. They really dug into the serious issues.

I am using intel Core i3 with 4 GB RAM. I have a big ERP project in C#. everything went smooth. But when I am writing big Linq expression my IDE stop responding. I have stopped intellesence but no luck.

Visual Studio 2010 is like 10 times slower in editing the same aspx files as Visual Studio 2008. The aspx files I'm talking about are producing JavaScript code (6000 lines of code) included in the homepage with the <script src=""> tag.
It takes VS 2010 a few seconds to respond to each key as I type. It's so bad that I do the editing in VS2008 (or even Notepad++) and I use VS2010 for compiling only (as I switched to Asp.Net 4 (which is also incredibly slow when compared to Asp.Net
2 with .Net 3.5)).

Microsoft, start testing Visual Studio with projects that have more than 10 lines of code (where the performance is ok). I mean, is http://social.msdn.microsoft.com or http://microsoft.com created using VS2010? Because the real life users of VS2010 create websites
that are way more complex than that.

Thanks and can't wait for SP2 to bring back the performance (does anybody remember VC++ 6 running/rocking on a Pentium II?)
Mihai Maerean

Since starting using 2010 Ultimate on XP it has gotten to the point I do not save anything until the end of the day because it takes so very long saving. On the average adding a new dataset takes 25 minutes. At this rate it will take me several
months to complete a small project.

For me, the suggestion of deleting all breakpoints was exactly correct. I had accumulated about 20-25 breakpoints, and even though they were all disabled, that was causing my tremendous slowdown. I'm talking several minutes just to launch my app in debug
mode. Deleted all the breakpoints and it starts in a couple seconds now. Thanks for that suggestion. I imagine deleting the .suo file might also work for the same issue (as was also suggested above) since I expect that's where the breakpoints are probably
stored.

VS2010 is unreasonably slooooooow. You have a problem and I'm afraid you can't admit it.

I've just browsed all these complaints and I just picked one to reply to you on. So many complaints and not from average users but from developers who typically know more than the average person at making things work.

For example, I have a I7-2630 Quad Core, 8GB memory with 256GB SSD on a brand new computer and it takes 15 seconds for the stupid Start Page to display. That is just the beginning, with even a simple project open, it can't keep up with my typing.
Really?????, you haven't noticed this yourself? Surely, you have seen this.

Also, when switching to a XAML code page (not in designer mode), it takes several seconds at least for the screen to be responsive. The mouse won't even scroll the window for several seconds at a time.

In case you might reply that it is a driver issue, or some other hardware issue, I've seen the same things on other platforms, such as my Lenova Thinkpad and my Dell Precision laptop. It would be insulting to get a response like that - it would be
a "cop-out".

I use VS2010 as well on my work computer and its *really* slow to launch. (Especially when launching via a file extension, for example .log). The splash sometimes stays up for 20 or so seconds before the main UI appears. VS2008 on the same box works incredibly
fast by comparison.

HP Z600 Workstation. Its a goooood machine. I wonder if its something with TFS?

For me loading solutions with 20 to 30 C++ projects and 1000 or so files takes 30 seconds to minutes on a an 8 or 12 threaded i7 > 3GHz processor with 8+ GB of ram. That is very frustrating and much slower than it was with Visual Studio 2008 on the
same machines. Also closing all documents is at least a 30 second delay on these systems.

I tried VS 2010 a while ago and reverted to 2008 because the performance was intolerable. Unfortunately I need some C++11 features so I'm trying out 2010 again. Here's what I see:

When I open a modest-sized C++ solution "cold" (after a reboot or if I haven't used VS for a while) it takes 1 minute 45 seconds to load on a dual-core i7 XP-32 laptop. The UI doesn't even appear until 1 minute 10 seconds in. There's a
lot of disk activity before the UI appears, and something sends a Start to the Windows Presentation Foundation Font Cache service.

If I close the solution and immediately reopen it loads in about 10 seconds.

From the above I suspect the huge startup delay has something to do with building/cacheing things for WPF. I've tried disabling the font cache service and also setting it to auto instead of manual but nothing makes a significant difference to whatever
is going on.

I'm using VS2010 Ultimate, 4GB RAM, Win7 Pro. One day the User Account Control dialog started popping up every time I start it, "Do you want to allow this program to make changs to this computer". It has been slow ever since and seems to be getting
slower every time I run it.

I tried VS 2010 a while ago and reverted to 2008 because the performance was intolerable. Unfortunately I need some C++11 features so I'm trying out 2010 again. Here's what I see:

When I open a modest-sized C++ solution "cold" (after a reboot or if I haven't used VS for a while) it takes 1 minute 45 seconds to load on a dual-core i7 XP-32 laptop. The UI doesn't even appear until 1 minute 10 seconds in. There's a
lot of disk activity before the UI appears, and something sends a Start to the Windows Presentation Foundation Font Cache service.

If I close the solution and immediately reopen it loads in about 10 seconds.

From the above I suspect the huge startup delay has something to do with building/cacheing things for WPF. I've tried disabling the font cache service and also setting it to auto instead of manual but nothing makes a significant difference to whatever
is going on.

Definitely, Visual Studio 2010 is not usable, whatever recommended change I could find on this page did not make it faster for me (Corei7, 8GB RAM, SSD drive).

THE SOLUTION I found is to run Visual in safe mode! Run "devenv /safemode" instead of "devenv". This disables all extensions (I tried to disable them myself from the Options menu but it had no effect, /safemode most likely disables more things) and then
Visual is as fast as 2008/2003 versions for me!

Definitely, Visual Studio 2010 is not usable, whatever recommended change I could find on this page did not make it faster for me (Corei7, 8GB RAM, SSD drive).

THE SOLUTION I found is to run Visual in safe mode! Run "devenv /safemode" instead of "devenv". This disables all extensions (I tried to disable them myself from the Options menu but it had no effect, /safemode most likely disables more things) and then
Visual is as fast as 2008/2003 versions for me!

Next step is to run Windows in safe mode ;-)

Jean

Safe Mode? That's a new one. The most common cause of slow response is the graphics hardware. Notice that "safe mode" takes the hardware graphics acceleration out of the picture, too.